The project began in 2014 when my daughter Jo came home from school. She was 12 years old (first year of high school) at the time.

Jo: “Dad, I’ve got a project to make a model of something scientific… can you help please…”

Me: “Sure, what model shall we work on ?”

Jo: (thinking)… “You know the Large Hadron Collider ?”

Me: (thinking I should encourage my kids to shoot for the stars) “Sure, let’s do it !!”

Jo: “Oh… by the way, we get extra marks if it works !”

So began the adventure of creating a working model particle accelerator. Yes, I know the LHC is a particle collider, but scaling back from collider to accelerator was a modest acknowledgement to the scale of the challenge…

Jo and I worked away…. hard… every Wednesday evening and every Saturday day… we learnt (or in my case, re-learnt) the relevant principles of electromagnetism… Jo learnt lots of practical skills like design, measuring, sawing, drilling, screwing, soldering and testing…

In six months, we did it, it actually worked ! We couldn’t believe our eyes. This was the result:

The original particle accelerator ! Arduino and electronics in the bottom level

There were several rounds of high fives before we packed it in its milk-crate and she took it to school to demonstrate. The feedback was incredible ! Everyone who saw it loved it ! The teacher gave it the infinity symbol – even better than full marks. And then the teacher asked to buy it !

When Jo told me the teacher had asked to buy it, I told her that’s a sign that there’s something special going on. There’s something entertaining, incredible and humorous about a miniature working particle accelerator model.

And so, phase 2 began. I’ve devoted all my free time since then to refine and improve, refine and improve, building up to a easy to assemble, reliable, affordable kit for everyone to enjoy. So far, it looks like this:

The spirit behind awesome.tech is to ‘accelerate’ innovation in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education. There’s a lot of worthwhile initiatives to increase STEM interest and participation among students, so where does the Personal Particle Accelerator fit in ? It:

encourages ‘hands-on’ construction. If students are to embrace the challenges and opportunities of STEM, they need the confidence that comes with getting hands-on.

is different – we’re proud to be the first to bring a digital-based particle accelerator kit to the STEM market

is topical – as the crew at CERN discover great things, isn’t it great if we can follow along, even in a humble way ?

is aimed at the top end of the class – especially senior years

is designed to have very clear linkages to careers – everything we do should spell out the careers that relate to the topic under discussion